Hardware

Review: The Ricoh Fi-8170 Scanner Creates Great Electronic Records In Minutes

This scanner will help agencies meet the deadline to preserve all documents electronically.

Carlos Soto is an award-winning reviewer and journalist with 20 years of experience covering technology and business within various sectors and industries.

Federal agencies have less than a year to shift from keeping paper documents to storing and managing all documents electronically. The National Archives and Records Administration’s deadline for the transition arrives next June 30.

The task of digitizing the millions of documents the federal government is required by law to keep and maintain in long-term storage — and also make easily searchable — is nearly impossible without a large fleet of easy-to-use digital scanners. The Ricoh fi-8170 (formerly Fujitsu) is ideally suited for the task.

The Ricoh fi-8170 is one of the speediest scanners in its class, able to batch scan up to 70 single-page documents per minute from its 80-sheet input tray. It offers superior image quality, easy sheet feeding and the industry-leading reliability that Ricoh scanning products are known for.

Measuring 11.8 by 6.7 by 6.4 inches and weighing a little less than 9 pounds, the scanner is small enough to fit on any desk as a personal unit, although with its speed and features it can also work as a shared device for a medium-sized workgroup.

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Scan Your Faded Receipts with Fine Detail and Little Damage

When testing scanners, receipt scanning is one process that is always heavily scrutinized for quality. The ink used to print receipts is problematic for many scanners because it’s often very light. And because paper receipts are not designed to last, they can smear and fade quickly.

When I loaded some poor-quality receipts into the Ricoh fi-8170, the scanner was able to fully decipher them using optical character recognition while preventing them from degrading further.

Other types of documents were also perfectly captured. While many scanners have about 30 color settings, this Ricoh model has 4,913. In all cases, the Ricoh fi-8170 captured very fine details in the documents and photographs I scanned

Effective scanners need to be versatile and speedy. To be suitable for government service, they must capture high-quality images. The Ricoh fi-8170 fits that bill. This scanner could find a good home with any federal agency that needs fast, high-quality scanning capabilities for documents of all sizes and types.

SPECIFICATIONS

MAX SCAN RESOLUTION: 1200 dpi
TOP SCANNING SPEED: 70 pages per minute
MAX DOC SCANNING SIZE: 8.5x14 inches
CONNECTIVITY: USB or network cable
DIMENSIONS: 11.8x6.7x6.4 inches
WEIGHT: 8.82 pounds

What Are the Top 3 Characteristics of a Good Agency Scanner?

Effective scanners in government service need to be versatile enough to handle various paper types and document sizes, quick enough to keep up with ongoing scanning needs and sophisticated enough to produce quality output that perfectly preserves original paper documents in a digital format.

Failing in any one of these three areas means more work for overstretched agency employees and potential delays in providing citizen services. Here’s how the Fjitsu fi-8170 scanner stacks up in each of these critical categories.

Versatility: The Ricoh fi-8170 is amazingly easy to use when scanning various documents of different sizes and paper types. With an impressive 80-page input tray capacity, this scanner makes light work of heavy tasks.

Scanners for government also need to support document sizes of at least 8.5 by 14 inches, with a maximum of 220 by 220 inches. Users should be able to scan various document types without having to reconfigure the scanner every time — they just load everything into the input tray and let the scanner sort it out.

Speed: In tests, the Ricoh fi-8170 easily sustained over 60 pages per minute with mixed document types and reached close to its 70-page-per-minute maximum speed during scans of more common and unified document types. At this rate, and with the massive capacity of the scanner’s input tray, agencies can process large stacks of documents in batches in mere minutes.

Another plus: The fi-8170’s document feeder design minimizes jams. I didn’t experience a single paper jam during the test period.

Quality: With a grayscale depth of 8 bits, 256 gray levels and 24-bit color depths for 16.7 million colors, the fi-8170 can capture almost any kind of document while preserving even the most subtle or highly detailed features of the original.

It boasts a maximum optical resolution of 600 dpi and a maximum interpolated resolution of 1200 dpi, ensuring that both colors and text pop off the screen once documents are scanned.